Prizmo: app can translate, voice your scanned docs

There are many free apps that let you scan documents or business cards – including a few free downloads available – but not many offer Optical Character Recognition, or OCR.

An OCR feature not only digitizes the words it scans off paper, using the camera built into a smartphone or tablet, but it also makes it into editable, searchable text. Therefore, instead of creating a PDF or JPG of a document, you'll be able to move around the words, copy and paste phrases, and look for a specific phrase by typing in a keyword, and more.

And so I was looking forward to test-driving Prizmo, one of the few scanning apps that claims to offer "highy accurate" OCR, and other features. And hey, it's on sale for $4.99 (50 percent off) until September 6, to commemorate back-to-school time.

The good news this iOS (and Mac) app works – but don't expect anywhere near 100 percent accuracy. Still, this app is great for students and businesses alike.

When you launch Prizmo, you can tap the camera icon at the bottom of the screen to turn on your device's rear-facing camera. Be sure to be in a place with adequate lighting as you'll see a marked improvement in accuracy. Whether you're standing over a business card flat on the table or photographing a document pinned to a corkboard in front of you, you'll line up the text and tap an onscreen button to snap the pic. You'll see your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch attempt to auto-focus to ensure the text is crisp, before you hear the shutter snap.

Now you'll see a digital version of your document or business card and you can tap the "Whole Page" tab to initiate the OCR. Or you can you can also grab the small markers to highlight only a specific portion of the page you want processed (or select the "Detect Page" tab for the app to guess what you'd like processed). The last step is to tap "Apply" and you'll see a virtual scanner arm comb through your document and show you the text. If there are errors you can manually fix them while reading through the text.

For example, I scanned an article I was reading on an airplane's in-flight magazine (En Route; August 2013 issue). Fourteen out of the 15 words in the sentence looked fine: "Now 67 years old, Lemmy looks much the same as when Mot/~rheaC formed in 1975." The band Motörhead has that "umlaut" (two dots over the "o"), which might've thrown off Prizmo, but there were other errors on the page, too. All in all, I'd say there was about 80 percent accuracy. Not bad, but far from perfect. Business cards fared much better at about 95 accuracy or higher.

Once you've scanned, analyzed and saved the document or business card on your iOS device, you can save it to an album, copy to a clipboard, send via email or open in another document (such as a PDF viewer). You can import business card information into your Contacts or share them as a vCard. The app supports cloud services, should you want to upload the documents from inside the app; supported services include iCloud, Dropbox, Evernote and Google Drive.

Another free option is to translate the text from English to many other languages. There are more than 40 languages supported (via Microsoft translation web service), from Arabic to Vietnamese. On a related note, there are also in-app purchases that will read your scanned text aloud, in one of 20 languages. In fact, there are more than 65 male or female voices to choose from, in total. Prices are $2.99 per pack, whether you go with "Heather - US English Female," "Will – US English Male," or "Louise - Canadian French Female." You get the idea. Note: I did not try this feature, but the comments on the App Store page suggest the VoiceOver option works well.

Other Prizmo features: the ability to "scan" and clean-up photos and any other images (whiteboards, ads, paintings, etc.); image and text processing options (rotate, crop, lighting tweaks); and no Internet connection required for image processing and performing OCR.

If the folks at Creaceed could work to improve the accuracy of the OCR, and reduce the price (perhaps keeping it at $4.99 for good), it would make this app a lot more appealing. But even with its issues it's still one of the most feature-rich document scanner apps around.